REQUIEM FOR AN AIR GUNNER.
The pain has stopped, for I am dead,
My time on earth is done.
But in a hundred years from now
I’ll still be twenty-one.

My brief, sweet life is over
My eyes no longer see,
No summer walks, no Christmas trees,
No pretty girls for me.

I’ve got the chop, I’ve had it.
My nightly ops are done.
Yet in another hundred years
I’ll still be twenty-one.

I may incorporate a poem by a Bomber Command veteran, John Pudney:

“Do not despair

For Johnny-head-in-air;

He sleeps as sound

As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud

For Johnny-in-the-cloud;

And keep your tears

For him in after years.

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Better by far

For Johnny-the-bright-star,

To keep your head,

And see his children fed.”

I have not decided yet on which ones I will definitely use, except for the following words which will certainly appear. They describe perfectly the job that, hopefully, I will have done. They were written by (possibly Robert) Wace, a Norman poet who was born in Jersey in the Channel Islands between 1099 and 1111 and who was last known to be alive in 1174. Wace was brought up in Caen in Normandy and eventually became Canon of Bayeux:

Eventually
All things decline
Everything falters, dies and ends
Towers cave in, walls collapse
Roses wither, horses stumble
Cloth grows old, men expire
Iron rusts and timber rots away
Nothing made by hand will last
I understand the truth
That all must die, both clerk and lay
And the fame of men now dead
Will quickly be forgotten
Unless the clerk takes up his pen
And brings their deeds to life again.

In Jersey’s Royal Square stands the States Building and a granite memorial stone to Wace is built into one of its side walls:

It has on it a proud quote from Wace’s major work, the Roman de Rou, the Tale of Rou, which tells the story of William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest, including Halley’s Comet :

Jo di e dirai ke jo sui
Wace de l’isle de Gersui

In Modern French it would be

Je dis et dirai que je suis
Wace de l’île de Jersey

And in English

I say and will say that I am
Wace from the Island of Jersey

It is also recorded in Modern Jèrriais, a language I had never heard of, but it still has an admittedly declining number of speakers on the island :

J’dis et dithai qu’jé sis
Wace dé l’Île dé Jèrri

It was Wace who introduced the idea of Halley’s Comet to the Bayeux Tapestry story:

Watch what you’re doing with that arrow !!!! You’ll take somebody’s eye out !!!!

Because I am a registered Nerd / parce que Je suis un geek de la langue française, I have the poem in Modern French and whatever language Wace spoke as well…Norman, Medieval French, Medieval Jèrriais, whatever. In the first section I have put ye Olde Frenche firste, and then modern French in Italics and then English. In the second section, see if you can think of the modern French words that ye Olde Frenche comethe fromme ….

26 responses to “And here is the news (4)……”

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

It’s a very beautiful poem. I was going to have it on my Dad’s grave but the cost of the letters was extremely expensive. Instead, I shortened it with the added bonus that it fitted on as well. It came out as “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
And while, with silent, lifting mind, I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God” It’s a very pale copy but it came in at a much more affordable price!

And have you told the story of your father? If so then I have missed it somewhere.

MY REPLY : I just mention him from time to time. I haven’t got a 100% idea of exactly what he got up to because in England the records supplied are very sparse to say the least and the government has made little if no effort to put things on line. I paid £35 for my Dad’s RAF records and they actually apologised for how little there was on them! In short he flew as a wireless operator / air gunner, and he trained in Wellingtons and flew 19 operations in Lancasters towards the end of the war, nearly all of them in daylight. And he seems to have met the Australians of 460 Squadron who he said would bet on anything and fight anybody. No comment from me on that one!

There certainly are. My favourite is the John Pudney which is made doubly poignant when you read about all the victims nowadays who suffer from PTSD and such things and who get very little help. Sadly, we haven’t learnt very much. There’s a price to winning wars and no politician ever paid it.

Nothing made by hand will last
I understand the truth
That all must die, both clerk and lay
And the fame of men now dead
Will quickly be forgotten
Unless the clerk takes up his pen
And brings their deeds to life again.

John, I like your idea of incorporating poetry in your book in progress. In a sense, your project will fulfill the hope expressed by the Norman poet Robert Wace of bringing “the fame [and deeds] of men now dead…to life again.”

There is no glory in warfare, only pain and loss. After all that we kill each other for, we soon realize that “nothing made by hand will last.” All the best with your project.

Thank you very much. Sometimes I think I will never finish, but now that I’m just 5 people from the end of the 105, and the preliminary work is mostly finished, I’m getting scared that I will actually have to produce something one day. At the moment I will be happy if I finish within a year from now…January 2019 shall we say. And you are absolutely right about poems. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a poem is worth good 600 !

I had the opportunity to learn languages when I was at school and I think a lot of people now don’t get that. Relationships with foreigners improve a million percent when you try to speak their language. It means to them that you don’t think you are any better than them and that you respect their culture. I don’t know any Italian but even ‘tante grazie’, (thank you) will have its effect. At the lowest level, bigger portions from the waiter.